At the moment Scala runs only on the JVM, with an outdated implementation for the CLR.
But there are some voices at the moment, that Microsoft is interested funding an up-to-date Scala port for .NET.
Considering the lack of any plan or oversight at Oracle’s side what to do with Java/the JVM/the ecosystem, how can a Scala developer be prepared that in the end there might be no decent platform left to run Scala on?
Are there any plans to have some “independent” implementation of a Scala VM in the future, which maps Scala’s feature to some bytecode/VM, instead of having to live with all these legacy bugs in current VM implementations (no generics, covariant arrays, weird annotations, no tail calls etc.)?
Here’s another view regarding the VM:
While not really Sun’s brightest moment if you look the whole picture, slapping the GPL license on JDK/related things has actually caused this wonderful situation where the whole JVM platform is completely independent from Oracle. I mean, the virtual machine isn’t tied to Java, the garbage collectors aren’t tied to Java and most importantly the Java programmers aren’t really tied to Java and thus Oracle.
As a Java programmer, I’d say we won – if Oracle decides to deprecate everything in Java world in hopes of bigger profits, we can just grab the VM and a modern language such as Scala and let Larry Ellison sail to sunset in his yacht for all we care.